I thought it’d be mean to just glue a coin somewhere. All that does is make people sad. So instead I used an un-gettable coin to put a person in a position to see something they COULD get: a flash drive in sealed container. It took me a long time to decide what to put on the flash drive. A selection of 1001 great e-books seemed generic and condescending. A selection of my own short stories seemed unforgivably egomaniacal. I don’t have great taste in music or movies.
I wanted to put some info on there that a relatively small percentage of people would come across on their own, and that had special significance to me. I finally hit on four free PDFs, scrounged off the internet:
The Disposessed, by Ursula K. Leguinn
Concrete Mathematics, A Foundation for Computer Science, By Donald Knuth et al
and The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tze
along with the four PDFS, I included a readme:
Hello, stranger,
You found this flash drive because you look for things. I respect that. I want to give you something.
There are four books on this flash drive: A book of fiction, a book of math, a book of wisdom, and a book of lockpicking. You might find that you like all of these books. You might only like one, or none. But this is an opportunity to absorb some information you might not have come across if you hadn’t found this. I hope you find something you like.
And if this sort of thing strikes your fancy, check out StoryLuck.org. I’m sure you have stories to tell.
– Tack
I wanted to hide the drive in a huge hole in the sidewalk a block and a half from my old apartment. Unfortunately, the building next to that crack was demolished a few months ago, and the dirt used to fill in the crack. If I’d done this last September, the flash drive might be a cool time capsule by now. Ah well. I was left to tool around the streets at 2 AM, looking for a comparable hiding spot.
So you know how sometimes the utility poles ride a few inches off the sidewalk?
Yeah.
I glued my coin (a gold dollar, for maximum shiny), in such a way that lady liberty’s torch pointed toward the hiding spot. I used two-part epoxy, so hopefully it holds.
Any sufficiently curious passer-by would easily spot the flash drive once they were crouched.
.
I hope someone finds it soon. Those are good books
